Research Program Manager (f/m/d)

Aleph Alpha Research’s mission is to deliver category-defining AI innovation that enables open, accessible, and trustworthy deployment of GenAI in industrial applications. Our organization develops foundational models and next-generation methods that make it easy and affordable for Aleph Alpha’s customers to increase productivity in development, engineering, logistics, and manufacturing processes.

We are seeking a Research Program Manager to define, refine, and align the research scope across our simultaneous engineering teams in Aleph Alpha Research. This role offers an exciting opportunity to work at the forefront of Al innovation and requires a unique blend of technical expertise in both Al research and SW engineering, program management, and communication skills.

The Research Program Manager coordinates Al research projects and tool development efforts, scoping and tracking goals and metrics, establishing project roadmaps, aligning with various stakeholders at different levels and across organizations, and ensuring delivery of impactful research artifacts and scalable solutions into production. Operating at eye-level with other researchers and engineers in our flat organizational structure, you will play a pivotal role in setting the direction of our research efforts without direct managerial responsibilities.

Your expertise will help shape the boundaries of innovative research while ensuring it aligns with mission and strategic goals, customer needs, technical feasibility, as well as policy considerations.

Your Responsibilities

• Scope Definition & Program Planning: Collaborate with research teams to define and refine the scope of foundational model training, Al agent behavior, and explainability initiatives. Develop and review project programs for targeted capabilities in collaboration with the research teams.

• Goal Validation & Tracking: Manage goal setting, prioritization, and breakdown for programs and projects up to level of individual goals. Conduct and manage technical review on research program and project objectives to ensure alignment with Aleph Alpha's mission, organizational priorities, and customer needs.

• Innovation Moderation: Initiate, plan, and facilitate team and project ideation and retrospective reviews and workshops, end-to-end across the full technology development cycle from idea to deployment in production.

• Release Quality, Coordination, and Communication: Work closely with teams across Aleph Alpha to coordinate and ensure quality of research releases and related communication artifacts.

• Research and Engineering, Publications: Contribute to the advancement of state-of-the-art algorithms and research tech infrastructure while guiding their practical application across research domains. Publish technical findings both internally and externally, and be part of team initiatives that make code assets source-available.

Your Profile

Basic Qualifications

• A Master’s degree in a relevant field such as Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.

• 2+ years of experience in technical program management or research coordination in the AI/ML or software engineering domains.

• Strong understanding of foundational AI/ML concepts, model training, deployment processes, and software development life cycles.

• Excellent project management skills with the ability to handle multiple, simultaneous initiatives.

• Exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, enabling collaboration across technical and non-technical teams.

• Ready to relocate to Heidelberg, Germany, or otherwise come to our Heidelberg office regularly, potentially weekly.

Preferred Qualification

• In-depth knowledge of foundational AI technologies, including model training pipelines, deployment frameworks, and explainability techniques.

• Proficiency in programming and scripting languages commonly used in AI/ML workflows (e.g., Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow).

• Hands-on experience in scoping and managing AI/ML research projects, including the development of metrics to evaluate research progress and outcomes.

• Familiarity with state-of-the-art foundational models, their capabilities, and their limitations.

Our Tenets

We believe embodying these values would make you a great fit in our team:

• We own work end-to-end, from idea to production: You take responsibility for every stage of the process, ensuring that our work is complete, scalable, and of the highest quality.

• We ship what matters: Your focus is on solving real problems for our customers and the research community. You prioritize delivering impactful solutions that bring value and make a difference.

• We work transparently: You collaborate and share your results openly with the team, partners, customers, and the broader community through publishing and sharing results and insight including blogposts, papers, checkpoints, and more.

• We innovate through leveraging our intrinsic motivations and talents: We strive for technical depth and to balance ideas and interests of our team with our mission-backwards approach, and leverage the interdisciplinary, diverse perspectives in our teamwork.

What You Can Expect From Us

• Become part of an AI revolution!

• 30 days of paid vacation

• Access to a variety of fitness & wellness offerings via Wellhub

• Mental health support through nilo.health

• Substantially subsidized company pension plan for your future security

• Subsidized Germany-wide transportation ticket

• Budget for additional technical equipment

• Flexible working hours for better work-life balance and hybrid working model

• Virtual Stock Option Plan

• JobRad® Bike Lease